50 Fun Facts I Learned at the Zoo, by Cee Glass

1. Flamingos weigh five to six pounds and can have a wingspan up to fifty-five inches.
2. A bald eagle can live as long as forty-eight years.
3. The orangutan is as strong as eight average men.
4. The lifespan of the average flying squirrel is fourteen years, nearly the same as the average marriage.
5. The bat is the only mammal that can fly.
6. Penguins spend about seventy-five percent of their lives in water.
7. The orangutan lives mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia.
8. Cows have four stomachs.
9. A group of owls is called a parliament, like the lawyers and judges in England. Gosh, I bet they don’t award full custody to just the owl moms.
10. Alligators can live up to one hundred years.
11. Deer can’t eat hay.
12. Protriptyline Hydrocholoride, commonly called Vivactil, is prescribed for depression and can cause heart attack, stroke, hallucinations, delusions, anxiety, agitation, panic, stress, hallucinations, bone marrow depression, skin rash, sexual terror and hallucinations.
13. An elephant can smell water up to three miles away.
14. A rodent’s teeth never stop growing.
15. A black vulture will attack a philandering mate, like one named Susan.
16. There are over two hundred breeds of goats in the world.
17. Fireflies are the only creatures that given off light without generating heat.
18. Butterflies can taste their feet. All I can taste is hate.
19. A starving mouse will eat its own tail.
20. Dalmatians are completely white at birth.
21. Anteaters can eat up to thirty thousand insects in one day which, if you compared insects to dollars, is just ten thousand dollars less than the average cost of a divorce.
22. The turkey is one of the most well-known birds in North America.
23. The Glock 19 is one of the most well-known handguns in North America.
24. Baby kangaroos are only about an inch long when they are born.
25. Swans mate for life. Susan is not a name for a swan.
26. Giraffes have no vocal cords. I can’t stop laughing, now.
27. The chimpanzee newborn is dependent on maternal support but they don’t restrict the alpha ape to weekend, supervised visitations.
28. The average fox can carry rabies, mange and other diseases and weighs fourteen pounds.
29. The Glock 19 can carry a fifteen-round magazine and weighs less than two pounds.
30. The Ostrich can travel over forty miles an hour.
31. A bullet can travel over eight hundred miles an hour.
32. Huffing spray paint this morning for breakfast can make you lose my hearing.
33. A housefly hums in the key of F, I read.
34. I don’t know shit about bears, okay?
35. Horses can’t vomit, or cry watching all the other people at the zoo with their families.
36. For every human in the world, there are at least one million ants.
37. Frogs are pointless.
38. It’s incredibly easy to track a cellphone.
39. A rooster is a male chicken.
40. A herd of unicorns is called a blessing.
41. The Galapagos turtle could fly if it really tried hard enough. It could fucking soar.
42. A hummingbird’s heart can beat over twelve hundred times per minute.
43. Dogs have sweat glands in between their paws.
44. Wolves exude a scent which informs the wolf pack which way to move when hunting.
45. A dog’s sense of smell is about a thousand billion times better than a human.
46. Woodpeckers can peck twenty times per minute.
47. The Glock 19 only has a 5.5-pound trigger.
48. Snakes do not blink.
49. A group of crows is called a murder. I already knew about murder.
50. Hippos can run faster than humans. A lot faster, but that’s not saying much now.

Cee Glass is a recovering writer, full-time computer nerd and all around hideous claw-beast, locked in a cage in Jeb’s basement.